Daily Archives: January 9, 2018

With the benefit of nearly a half century of hindsight and purely from the vantage point of surviving audio tapes, it was an absolutely remarkable one for the Beatles, starting January 2 and entering the sessions on January 9. Amid sniping that peaked with a threatened walkout in unpleasant, wholly uninspiring surroundings, the Beatles put together — between mostly recently written shells and completelyneworiginals — a compact set of fresh songs they could reasonably stage for a TV show. Just the night before, after days of deliberation, it sounded like they had come to consensus on what and where the show would be.

January 9 began, as many of the days at Twickenham Film Studios had, with Paul McCartney the first Beatle in the room. Today, he took a guest with him to the office.

From the conversation, it’s clear that Paul didn’t take his work home with him. She knew very little about the group’s plans regarding the live show.

Linda: So if you do it, it would be in here?

Paul: Dunno. There’s many a story …

MLH: If we do it here, we’ll do it in here.

Paul: But if we don’t, it’s on a boat to Tripoli.

Linda, like George Harrison the day before, instantly questioned the practicality of a boat trip. “What do you do with the equipment?”

Well, that’s Apple’s problem, Michael and Paul agreed.

The conversation abruptly shifted to a book Michael was reading — the title is never mentioned, but he clearly described My Father and Myself by J. R. Ackerley — before an evidently disinterested Paul bailed out minutes later: “I better go and put in some piano practice.”

Paul’s demonstration piece was an unfinished original, perhaps inspired by Linda’s time as a receptionist in New York before they met and after her first marriage. Or it may have just been another McCartney original observing life through a woman’s eyes, one Wings drummer Denny Seiwell would later call “Eleanor Rigby in New York.”

In two years’ time, “Another Day” was Paul McCartney’s first single as a solo artist (the 1970 McCartney LP yielded no singles), reaching No. 2 in the U.K. and No. 5 in the U.S. It also received a Linda McCartney co-writing credit, a fact that eventually spawned yet another Beatles-related lawsuit.

The song was name-checked that same 1971 in John Lennon’s furiously anti-Paul diatribe “How Do You Sleep”: “The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’re gone you’re just another day.” The “Another Day” reference was actually written by Allen Klein, not Lennon.

But on January 9, 1969, Klein was a few weeks away from smashing into the Beatles orbit, and John was Paul’s partner, still a few moments from joining the day’s sessions. “Another Day,” however, was recognizable in this early state, the song’s first two verses largely identical to what Paul would record in New York in October 1970.

The sleeve of the Portuguese release of the “Another Day” single featuring Twickenham Paul.

Paul sang delicately and tentatively on the tapes, in contrast to his bolder performance on piano in his practice session. He’s searching, unsuccessfully, for a bridge to the song, and there’s no chorus. After about three minutes and two-plus repetitions of the two verses, Paul simply moved on to improvisations and several other previously debuted numbers (to be explored in subsequent posts).

The song could be heard just once more on the Nagra tapes, for less than a minute, in a fleeting rendition by Paul on acoustic guitar during an equipment change on January 25. “Another Day” was never a serious consideration for a Beatles record.